The Gulf Oil Spill

The Leak – What Happened? On April 20, working approximately 41 miles offshore Louisiana on Mississippi Canyon, Deepwater Horizon was two days away from temporarily capping the oil well it had drilled and handing off the pumping of the oil to a production platform. During this disconnection process a methane pocket frozen as a crystallized formation beneath the seabed was warmed by a cementing process and became unstable. Highly pressurized oil started coming out of the wellhead and up the well pipe. The rig suffered a blowout, followed an explosion, and sank to the bottom. Of the 126-member crew, 115 were safely evacuated. Despite exhaustive rescue efforts, eleven crew members lost their lives, nine of which were Transocean employees. The Exxon Valdez tanker spill has now been eclipsed by this spill as the greatest disaster in US oil industry history. Estimated costs of the oil spill to Gulf Coast residents are now upward of $14 billion to gulf state communities. BP has mobilized two rigs to drill a relief well. Such a well could help redirect the oil, though it could also take months to complete, especially at that depth. BP so far has been unable to stop the oil flow by sabotaging the well since it holds $ billions in oil. The one method that will work is sitting on the shelf along with many hair-brained ideas, i.e., nuke it, plug it with cotton, etc.

How to Stop the Oil. Instead of pouring mud into the pipe, use a special concrete. Chesapeake Specialty Products, a Maryland company, makes an epoxy three times as dense as regular concrete. By shooting this material into the hole, it will quickly shut off the oil Flow.

Drilling mud does not have enough density (specific gravity) to guarantee success. Chesapeake Specialty Products has 4,000 tons of HDM, a granulated iron product with specific gravity of 6.0, and a liquid epoxy binder added, will produce a solid block under sea water. The company's HDM is currently used in radiation shielding, ship ballast and security barriers. If the proper mixes of granular size of any product is not used, there will be either premature plugging of pipe or lack of plugging at well head.

But BP has ruled this out because they would not be able to access the well in the future. It's all about money!

http://crooksandliars.com/karoli/businessman-fights-get-his-solution-oil-lea

How It Happened. At least four basic procedures could have prevented this disaster. Transocean, the world’s largest offshore drilling contractor, owned the oil rig.

1. After the drill pipe that connects to the drill bit had reached the oil reservoir, a well pipe was lowered around the drill pipe thru the larger hole that is created by the drill bit. A subcontractor to Transocean, Halliburton sent a concrete slurry down through the well pipe and out through a check valve at the bottom of the well pipe casing. The concrete then traveled up the outside of the pipe. As the concrete was hardening to prevent oil or gas from leaking up, Halliburton installed a concrete plug at the bottom of the well 18,000 feet below the sea floor at the mouth of the oil reservoir. This is a sensitive process that, according to government experts, can trigger catastrophic blowouts if not performed attentively. To make matter worse Halliburton started removing a mud barrier above the 1^st plug before the final second required concrete plug was installed when the blow out occurred. If all of the mud had still been present, it would have helped push back against the gas burping up toward the rig, though it might not have held it back indefinitely.

2. The blowout preventer is a device that failed to function properly. It is a stack sitting on the ocean floor, a 450-ton series of valves developed to prevent a gusher if the mud control is overwhelmed. With only seconds to react, rig operators fired off the shear ram in the BOP, but it only partially sheared the drill pipe. A joint may have been in the way, or the ram was fouled by pieces of casing or cement from the blowout. Six robot submarines with robotic arms, remotely operated, failed to fix the blowout preventer.

3. BP violated the law by drilling to depths of 22,000-25,000 feet instead of the 18,000 feet maximum depth allowed by its permit may have contributed to this catastrophe.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2515313/posts

4. A manual acoustic shutoff switch could have stopped the flow but was not installed. Acoustic switches are required by law for all offshore rigs off Brazil and in Norway's North Sea operations. In 2000, the Minerals Management Service while weighing a comprehensive rulemaking for drilling safety, deemed the acoustic mechanism "essential" and proposed to mandate the mechanism on all gulf rigs. But then in stepped Dick Cheney who conducted secret meetings with over 100 oil industry officials allowing them to draft a wish list of industry demands to be implemented by the oil friendly administration. Cheney also used that time to re-staff the Minerals Management Service with oil industry insiders. In 2003, newly reconstituted Minerals Management Service bowed to the oil cartel by recommending the removal of the proposed requirement for acoustic switches and Bush's 2005 energy bill officially dropped the requirement for the acoustic switch off devices. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704423504575212031417936798.html

The Blame.

Minerals Management Service (MMS) is an agency of the United States Department of the Interior (Ken Salazar) charged with the management of the renewable energy, oil and gas, and mineral resources. S. Elizabeth (Liz) Birnbaum assumed duties as is the Director of MMS on July 15, 2009 under Department of the Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. She was fired in late May 2010.

In May 2009 Kenneth Abbott, a former project control supervisor contracted by BP, wrote a whistleblower letter to Birnbaum. In his letter he warned Birnbaum that BP had faulty hardware on the ocean floor that was leaking and was in violation of MMS rules by not completing engineering documents for operation of their oil platforms. Yet Birnbaum did nothing to review permits issued wrongly for all the rigs in the Gulf. On May 17^th, 2010 Abbott filed a lawsuit asking that Birnbaum halt operations at another BP platform, the Atlantis, a massive oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico. He alleges that BP and the MMS never reviewed critical engineering designs for platform operations and is therefore risking another catastrophic accident that could "dwarf" the company's Deepwater Horizon spill. http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/latest-news/whistleblower-sues-stop-another-bp-rig-operating

Chrys Oynes Fired. He was the associate director of Offshore Energy and Minerals Management at the Minerals Management Service. Oynes oversaw oil and gas leasing in the Gulf of Mexico for 12 years. He played a central role in a "foul-up" at the MMS' regional office in New Orleans that cost taxpayers an estimated $10 billion in lost revenue. Chrys Oynes covered up this multibillion-dollar mistake for six years. Chevron officials met with Chris Oynes three times in 1998 and 1999 to discuss the lack of price triggers. But Oynes told lawmakers at a hearing he did not recall those conversations. Sam Fraser, an economist at the MMS Herndon, Va. office, first discovered the problem in 2000 and relayed the information to his superiors. The Interior Department's inspector general called the matter "a jaw-dropping example of bureaucratic bungling.” Despite this the agency's then-director was directed by Dick Cheney to promote Oynes in 2007 to associate director for the offshore program. http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl//4185660.html

http://upload.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=433x301961

On September 10, 2008, Inspector General Devaney found wrongdoing by a dozen current and former employees of the Minerals Management Service. Devaney wrote “A culture of ethical failure” pervades the agency. Eight officials accepted gifts from energy companies whose value exceeded limits set by ethics rules — including golf, ski, and paintball outings; meals; drinks; and tickets to concerts, football games, and other expensive events. The investigation also concluded that several of the officials “frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana, and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives. The reports portray a dysfunctional organization that has been riddled with conflicts of interest, unprofessional behavior and a free-for-all atmosphere for much of the Bush administration’s watch.

Since January 2005, the federal Minerals Management Service conducted at least 16 fewer inspections aboard the Deepwater Horizon than it should have under the policy, a dramatic fall from the frequency of prior years.

Since the start of the Obama administration, three lease sales, 103 seismic blasting projects and 346 drilling plans were approved by MMS without National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) permits. NOAA has repeatedly warned the MMS the extractive activities effectively were illegal without permits to be in compliance with federal law.

In the wake of the spill, Interior Secretary Ken Slazar announced plans to split MMS into two separate agencies: one that would oversee safety compliance and another that would oversee drilling leases and royalty collection.

Halliburton May Emerge as the Primary Villain in this Caper. Wherever there's a national tragedy involving oil, Cheney's offshore company Halliburton, the giant energy services company, is never far a field. Cementing a deep-water drilling operation is the single most important factor in 18 of 39 well blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico over a 14-year period, and Halliburton has been accused of a poor cement job in the case of at least one major blowout in the Timor Sea off Australia in August 2009 where an investigation is ongoing. Investigators are now focusing on the role of Halliburton Co.which was responsible for cementing the drill into place below the water.

http://www.salem-news.com/articles/may142010/oil-cheney-ro.php

Halliburton and its subsidiary KBR are the single greatest beneficiary of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. KBR has been paid nearly $32 billion since 2001. In May, April 2009 Stephenson, director of the Defense Contract Audit Agency, testified that KBR was linked to “the vast majority” of war-zone fraud cases and a majority of the $13 billion in “questioned” or “unsupported” costs. According to Agency, it sent the inspector general “a total of 32 cases of suspected over billing, bribery and other violations since 2004.” According to the Associated Press, which obtained an early copy of the commission’s report, “billions of dollars” of the total paid to KBR “ended up wasted due to poorly defined work orders, inadequate oversight and contractor inefficiencies.” KBR is at the center of a lethal scandal involving the electrocution deaths of more than a dozen US soldiers, allegedly as a result of faulty electrical work done by the company. The DoD paid KBR more than $80 million in bonuses for the very work that resulted in the electrocution deaths.

Halliburton and the Corps of Engineers (CoE - at the mercy of pork barrel spending). Bunny Greenhouse is a former chief contracting officer Senior Executive Service (Principal Assistant Responsible for Contracting (PARC)) of the United States Army Corps of Engineers. Greenhouse developed a reputation as being a stickler for the rules and a staunch defender of the taxpayers' dime. She testified before Congress alleging specific instances of waste, fraud, and other abuses and irregularities by Halliburton with regard to its operations in Iraq since the 2003 invasion. She described one of the Halliburton contracts (secret, no-bid $5 billion support contract awarded to Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR)—a subsidiary of Halliburton) as "the most blatant and improper contract abuse I have witnessed during the course of my professional career." Greenhouse argued that the five-year term for the KBR contract, which had not been put out for competitive bid, was not justified, that it should be for one year only and then be opened to competition. The administration has been accused of giving Halliburton preferential treatment because Vice President Dick Cheney was once Halliburton CEO before he became vice president and wants to reward his friends and possible get kickbacks. For example the $5 billion support contract had to be reported to Dick Cheney’s office before it could become effective, a highly unorthodox procedure. And within a year auditors determined that KBR had overcharged the U.S. Government by $1 billion requiring KBR to give back most of that money. Halliburton has been mired in allegations of overcharging and mismanagement in Iraq.

http://www.politicususa.com/en/dick-cheney-katrina

The Politics.

Mom and Pop Operations Need Big Government Off Their Back – all those little operations out there in the Gulf like Exxon Mobil, Shell, and Conoco Phillips. Democratic leadership tried to push forward a vote on a piece of legislation that would have raised the cap on oil company liabilities from $75 million to $10 billion. But the Democrats were blocked by Sen. Lisa Murkowksi (R-AK), who argued that by raising the level of liability that high, the government would make it prohibitive for small companies to drill offshore.

It's Obama’s Fault -

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/earl-ofari-hutchinson/sniffing-obamas-political_b_594251.html